Subtitles and Transcript

Naomi Klein

0:11
I just did something I've never done before.I spent a week at sea on a research vessel.Now I'm not a scientist,but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific teamfrom the University of South Floridawho have been tracking the travels of BP's oilin the Gulf of Mexico.This is the boat we were on, by the way.The scientists I was withwere not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff --the birds, the turtles,the dolphins, the glamorous stuff.They're looking at the really little stuffthat gets eaten by the slightly less little stuffthat eventually gets eaten by the big stuff.And what they're findingis that even trace amounts of oil and dispersantscan be highly toxic to phytoplankton,which is very bad news,because so much life depends on it.So contrary to what we heard a few months backabout how 75 percent of that oilsort of magically disappearedand we didn't have to worry about it,this disaster is still unfolding.It's still working its way up the food chain.Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us.Rachel Carson --the godmother of modern environmentalism --warned us about this very thingback in 1962.She pointed out that the "control men" --as she called them --who carpet-bombed towns and fieldswith toxic insecticides like DDT,were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects,not the birds.But they forgot this:the fact that birds dine on grubs,that robins eat lots of wormsnow saturated with DDT.And so, robin eggs failed to hatch,songbirds died en masse,towns fell silent.Thus the title "Silent Spring."I've been trying to pinpointwhat keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico,because I'm Canadian,and I can draw no ancestral ties.And I think what it isis I don't think we have fully come to termswith the meaning of this disaster,with what it meant to witness a holeripped in our world,with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earthgush forth on live TV,24 hours a day,for months.After telling ourselves for so longthat our tools and technology can control nature,suddenly we were face-to-facewith our weakness,with our lack of control,as the oil burst outof every attempt to contain it --"top hats," "top kills"and, most memorably, the "junk shot" --the bright ideaof firing old tires and golf ballsdown that hole in the world.But even more strikingthan the ferocious power emanating from that wellwas the recklessnesswith which that power was unleashed --the carelessness, the lack of planningthat characterized the operationfrom drilling to clean-up.If there is one thingBP's watery improv act made clear,it is that, as a culture,we have become far too willing to gamblewith things that are preciousand irreplaceable,and to do so without a back-up plan,without an exit strategy.And BP was hardlyour first experience of this in recent years.Our leaders barrel into wars,telling themselves happy storiesabout cakewalks and welcome parades.Then, it is years of deadly damage control,Frankensteins of sieges and surgesand counter-insurgencies,and once again, no exit strategy.Our financial wizards routinely fall victimto similar overconfidence,convincing themselves that the latest bubbleis a new kind of market --the kind that never goes down.And when it inevitably does,the best and the brightestreach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot --in this case, throwing massive amountsof much-needed public moneydown a very different kind of hole.As with BP, the hole does get plugged,at least temporarily,but not beforeexacting a tremendous price.We have to figure outwhy we keep letting this happen,because we are in the midstof what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all --deciding what to do, or not to do,about climate change.Now as you know,a great deal of time is spent,in this country and around the world,inside the climate debate,on the question of, "What if the IPC scientistsare all wrong?"Now a far more relevant question --as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it --is, "What if those scientists are right?"Given the stakes, the climate crisisclearly calls for us to actbased on the precautionary principle --the theory that holdsthat when human health and the environmentare significantly at riskand when the potential damage is irreversible,we cannot afford to waitfor perfect scientific certainty.Better to err on the side of caution.More overt, the burden of provingthat a practice is safeshould not be placed on the public that would be harmed,but rather on the industry that stands to profit.But climate policy in the wealthy world --to the extent that such a thing exists --is not based on precaution,but rather on cost-benefit analysis --finding the course of action that economists believewill have the least impacton our GDP.So rather than asking, as precaution would demand,what can we do as quickly as possibleto avoid potential catastrophe,we ask bizarre questions like this:"What is the latest possible moment we can waitbefore we begin seriously lowering emissions?Can we put this off till 2020,2030, 2050?"Or we ask,"How much hotter can we let the planet getand still survive?Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or --where we're currently going --four degrees Celsius?"And by the way,the assumption that we can safely controlthe Earth's awesomely complex climate systemas if it had a thermostat,making the planet not too hot, not too cold,but just right -- sort of Goldilocks style --this is pure fantasy,and it's not coming from the climate scientists.It's coming from the economistsimposing their mechanistic thinkingon the science.The fact is that we simply don't knowwhen the warming that we createwill be utterly overwhelmedby feedback loops.So once again,why do we take these crazy riskswith the precious?A range of explanationsmay be popping into your mind by now,like "greed."This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it,because taking big risks, as we all know,pays a lot of money.Another explanation that you often hear for recklessnessis hubris.And greed and hubrisare intimately intertwinedwhen it comes to recklessness.For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old bankertaking home 100 times morethan a brain surgeon,then you need a narrative,you need a storythat makes that disparity okay.And you actually don't have a lot of options.You're either an incredibly good scammer,and you're getting away with it -- you gamed the system --or you're some kind of boy genius,the likes of which the world has never seen.Now both of these options -- the boy genius and the scammer --are going to make you vastly overconfidentand therefore more proneto taking even bigger risks in the future.By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP,had a plaque on his deskinscribed with this inspirational slogan:"What would you attempt to doif you knew you could not fail?"Now this is actually a popular plaque,and this is a crowd of overachievers,so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque.Don't feel ashamed.Putting fear of failure out of your mindcan be a very good thingif you're training for a triathlonor preparing to give a TEDTalk,but personally, I think people with the powerto detonate our economy and ravage our ecologywould do better havinga picture of Icarus hanging from the wall,because -- maybe not that one in particular --but I want them thinking about the possibility of failureall of the time.So we have greed,we've got overconfidence/hubris,but since we're here at TEDWomen,let's consider one other factorthat could be contributing in some small wayto societal recklessness.Now I'm not going to belabor this point,but studies do show that, as investors,women are much less proneto taking reckless risks than men,precisely because, as we've already heard,women tend not to suffer from overconfidencein the same way that men do.So it turns outthat being paid less and praised lesshas its upsides --for society at least.The flipside of thisis that constantly being toldthat you are gifted, chosenand born to rulehas distinct societal downsides.And this problem -- call it the "perils of privilege" --brings us closer, I think,to the root of our collective recklessness.Because none of us -- at least in the global North --neither men nor women,are fully exempt from this message.Here's what I'm talking about.Whether we actively believe themor consciously reject them,our culture remains in the gripsof certain archetypal storiesabout our supremacyover others and over nature --the narrative of the newly discovered frontierand the conquering pioneer,the narrative of manifest destiny,the narrative of apocalypse and salvation.And just when you think these stories are fading into history,and that we've gotten over them,they pop up in the strangest places.For instance, I stumbled across this advertisementoutside the women's washroomin the Kansas City airport.It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone,and yes, it really does say,"Slap Mother Nature in the face."And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola --that's just a bonus.I'm showing it because --they're not a sponsor, are they? --because, in its own way,this is a crass versionof our founding story.We slapped Mother Nature around and won,and we always win,because dominating nature is our destiny.But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature.There's another one, equally important,about how that very same Mother Natureis so nurturing and so resilientthat we can never make a dent in her abundance.Let's hear from Tony Hayward again."The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean.The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into itis tiny in relation to the total water volume."In other words, the ocean is big;she can take it.It is this underlying assumption of limitlessnessthat makes it possibleto take the reckless risks that we do.Because this is our real master-narrative:however much we mess up,there will always be more --more water, more land,more untapped resources.A new bubble will replace the old one.A new technology will come alongto fix the messes we made with the last one.In a way, that is the storyof the settling of the Americas,the supposedly inexhaustible frontierto which Europeans escaped.And it's also the story of modern capitalism,because it was the wealth from this landthat gave birth to our economic system,one that cannot survive without perpetual growthand an unending supplyof new frontiers.Now the problem isthat the story was always a lie.The Earth always did have limits.They were just beyond our sights.And now we are hitting those limitson multiple fronts.I believe that we know this,yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop.Not only do we continue to tell and retellthe same tired stories,but we are now doing sowith a frenzy and a furythat, frankly, verges on camp.How else to explain the cultural spaceoccupied by Sarah Palin?Now on the one hand,exhorting us to "drill, baby, drill,"because God put those resources into the groundin order for us to exploit them,and on the other, glorying in the wildernessof Alaska's untouched beautyon her hit reality TV show.The twin message is as comforting as it is mad.Ignore those creeping fearsthat we have finally hit the wall.There are still no limits.There will always be another frontier.So stop worrying and keep shopping.Now, would that this were just aboutSarah Palin and her reality TV show.In environmental circles,we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables,we are continuing with business as usual.This assessment, unfortunately,is far too optimistic.The truth is that we have already exhaustedso much of the easily accessible fossil fuelsthat we have already entereda far riskier business era,the era of extreme energy.So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water,including the icy Arctic seas,where a clean-up may simply be impossible.It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gasand massive strip-mining operations for coal,the likes of which we haven't yet seen.And most controversially, it means the tar sands.I'm always surprised by how littlepeople outside of Canadaknow about the Alberta Tar Sands,which this year are projected to becomethe number one source of imported oilto the United States.It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice,because I believe it speaks to recklessnessand the path we're onlike little else.So this is where the tar sands live,under one of the last magnificentBoreal forests.The oil is not liquid.You can't just drill a hole and pump it out.Tar sand's oil is solid,mixed in with the soil.So to get at it,you first have to get rid of the trees.Then, you rip off the topsoiland get at that oily sand.The process requires a huge amount of water,which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds.That's very bad news for local indigenous peopleliving downstreamwho are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates.Now looking at these images,it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation,which can already be seen from spaceand could grow to an area the size of England.I find it helps actuallyto look at the dump trucks that move the earth,the largest ever built.That's a person down there by the wheel.My point is thatthis is not oil drilling.It's not even mining.It is terrestrial skinning.Vast, vivid landscapesare being gutted,left monochromatic gray.Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concernedthis would be an abominationif it emitted not one particle of carbon.But the truth is that, on average,turning that gunk into crude oilproduces about three times more greenhouse gas pollutionthan it does to produce conventional oilin Canada.How else to describe this,but as a form of mass insanity?Just when we know we need to be learningto live on the surface of our planet,off the power of sun, wind and waves,we are frantically diggingto get at the dirtiest,highest-emitting stuff imaginable.This is where our story of endless growthhas taken us,to this black hole at the center of my country --a place of such planetary painthat, like the BP gusher,one can only stand to look at it for so long.As Jared Diamond and others have shown us,this is how civilizations commit suicide,by slamming their foot on the acceleratorat the exact momentwhen they should be putting on the brakes.The problem is that our master-narrativehas an answer for that too.At the very last minute, we are going to get savedjust like in every Hollywood movie,just like in the Rapture.But, of course, our secular religion is technology.Now, you may have noticedmore and more headlines like these.The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called,is that, as the planet heats up,we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particlesinto the stratosphereto reflect some of the sun's raysback to space,thereby cooling the planet.The wackiest plan -- and I'm not making this up --would put what is essentially a garden hose18-and-a-half miles high into the sky,suspended by balloons,to spew sulfur dioxide.So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution.Think of it as the ultimate junk shot.The serious scientists involved in this researchall stress that these techniquesare entirely untested.They don't know if they'll work,and they have no ideawhat kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash.Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineeringis being greeted in some circles,particularly media circles,with a relief tinged with euphoria.An escape hatch has been reached.A new frontier has been found.Most importantly,we don't have to change our lifestyles after all.You see, for some people,their savior is a guy in a flowing robe.For other people, it's a guy with a garden hose.We badly need some new stories.We need stories that have different kinds of heroeswilling to take different kinds of risks --risks that confront recklessness head on,that put the precautionary principle into practice,even if that means through direct action --like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested,blocking dirty power plantsor fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining.We need storiesthat replace that linear narrative of endless growthwith circular narrativesthat remind usthat what goes around comes around.That this is our only home.There is no escape hatch.Call it karma, call it physics,action and reaction, call it precaution --the principle that reminds usthat life is too precious to be riskedfor any profit.Thank you.(Applause)